Twitter Shuts Down Nitter
Richard Speed (Hacker News 3):
XCancel’s home page now contains some minimal text stating: “On Monday 24th August at 8 PM EST, we received at [sic] letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.”
It says the service has been halted “until further notice.”
[…]
Nitter provided a way for users to read posts on X without requiring an account. There was no JavaScript or ads, a user’s IP could not be tracked, and it was generally a good deal snappier than the official X client, just read-only. It was the service behind platforms such as XCancel.
The only thing surprising about this is how long it took.
Companies like X and Meta are very happy to scrape the web at unprecedented scale and without permission, but have zero tolerance for the same to be done to them by, in effect, individual users. That is not because they are protective of the creative works users have contributed to these platforms. It is simply because users are not trusted to use the platforms. X does not permit third-party readers, and neither does Instagram, because their value does not come from us using these services as we wish, but from how they dictate we must.
Previously:
- Old Reddit Now Requires Logging In
- Reddit Pushes Web Visitors to App
- Instagram Shuts Down Basic Display API
- Twitter for Mac Dead Again
- Social Media AI Training
- Web Scraping for Me, But Not for Thee
- Twitter Now Requires Logging In
- Migrating From Twitter to Mastodon
Update (2026-09-07): There are currently twelve working Nitter instances (Hacker News).
Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue.
7 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
This is why I really wish people would stand behind all their bluster about how they hate Elon Musk soooo much but so many links still go to a dead end on Twitter.
I refuse to sign in or use the app, so Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc are intentionally broken. And therefore about all I can read linked from blogs anymore is Mastodon links.
They used to pretend there was a usable web interface but they all treat it like a "free sample" now and block access to the site in any way without it.
So is scraping fair use or not? Is something "publicly available data" that can be used in any way once it's posted on the internet, or not? The hypocrisy
There’s many low friction alternatives now without having your online socialising be gated by politically biased organisations and gated lock-in. Everyone is getting a second rate experience on X.
Overall I think XCancel/Nitter should not be C&D'd into oblivion and I do think people should be able to browse X without JS or logging in. I also agree wholeheartedly with Nick Heer's assessment of the hypocritical nature of X/Meta's stance on scraping the web. However, the assumption that Nitter is "scraping the web" for "in effect, individual users" strikes me as naive. Nitter is software designed around X's anti-scraping protection. Its utility to other firms who would benefit from vacuuming up X's data is clear, and most likely the reason that X went after them.
"Nitter is software designed around X's anti-scraping protection. Its utility to other firms who would benefit from vacuuming up X's data is clear"
Nitter instances themselves have measures against scraping. I'm not sure entities that wanted to scrape Twitter benefited much from Nitter.
Well now I can no longer read X posts, because I will not log in and so they prevent me from being able to see it.
I sure hope though that someone decides to fork / continue Nitter and do so anonymously and on open platforms that can't just get shut down by contacting an entity like GitHub. They can't effectively C&D you if there's no way to find out who you are. It can be done, though granted it's not without risk.
Fuck 'em.
Twitter was great for "discovery", once. Now I have the RSS feed URLs for the people and sites I find interesting, and that list grows all the time. I will do without "X" as easily as I do Meta and (to a notably smaller extent) Google.
